Special Air Service (SAS)
(1941–1945)
France
Brotherhood Rank #49
"Who Dares Wins. Who Hesitates Gets Machine-Gunned in the Desert." — Unofficial SAS proverb, probably yelled over an explosion
The night smelled like cordite and camel piss. A truck full of British lunatics was tearing across the Libyan desert, headlights off, engines snarling like demons on furlough. In the back, a row of sunburned commandos were stripping fuses with their teeth, prepping for a little midnight gardening—planting explosives under German aircraft like it was the world’s deadliest Easter hunt. Somewhere ahead, Benghazi shimmered under moonlight, full of fuel depots and Luftwaffe toys begging to be reduced to modern art. One of the lads—bare-chested, grinning, and very possibly insane—shouted over the wind, “We’re lost, aren’t we?”
The reply came from their commander, a wiry Scotsman with a face like a hatchet and a voice like whisky on fire:
“Lost? We’re bloody inventing where we’re going.”
Welcome to the birth of the SAS.
The Bastards Behind the Sandstorm
In 1941, the British Army was getting its teeth kicked in across North Africa. The Nazis owned the skies, Rommel owned the desert, and the British high command owned about as much imagination as a sandbag. Enter one David Stirling—a wounded Guards officer with too much time in a Cairo hospital bed and too many bad ideas to keep to himself. He convinced the brass to let him form a “special air service brigade” to wreak havoc behind enemy lines. The name was a con, a fake “airborne unit” meant to fool the Germans into thinking the British had parachutists everywhere.
Except then Stirling actually made it real.
He recruited the unhinged, the disobedient, and the terminally allergic to orders—men who’d been court-martialed, drunk, or bored enough to risk death for sport. These were not polished parade soldiers. These were professional chaos merchants with sunburns and submachine guns. They trained to parachute into the middle of nowhere, blow up planes, and then vanish like the devil’s own sand fleas.
Their early motto was simple: If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t, blow it up anyway.
Baptism by Fire (and Wind and Sand)
The SAS’s first operation was, in military terms, a flaming disaster. In November 1941, they parachuted into a desert storm so violent it might as well have been Hell’s own welcome committee. Half their men were scattered or lost, several died on impact, and the rest barely crawled out alive. Stirling didn’t quit—he just switched tactics. He teamed up with the Long Range Desert Group, a band of New Zealand maniacs who drove Jeeps across the Sahara like it was a racetrack, and turned the SAS into a mechanized death cult.
Instead of parachuting, they drove—slipping hundreds of miles behind enemy lines to attack airfields and supply depots. In a single night, they could destroy dozens of aircraft with nothing more than a handful of men, a few jerry cans of explosives, and the kind of suicidal confidence usually reserved for prophets and sociopaths.
Their favorite trick?
Sneak into a German base under the cover of darkness, screw bombs onto aircraft wings, and drive off into the dawn as entire Luftwaffe squadrons exploded behind them.
They weren’t just fighting a war—they were performing it.
The Kings of Controlled Chaos
The SAS were not conventional soldiers. They were pirates in khaki. They slept in the dirt, ate from tins, and carried the war in their eyes. They could hold their ground if they had to—dig in, ambush, and vanish again—but defense wasn’t their game. Offense was their art form.
They specialized in asymmetry—small units hitting big targets, outnumbered and outgunned but never outsmarted. They didn’t march; they prowled. They didn’t fight fair; they fought efficiently. Each man was expected to think like a commander and kill like a professional.
Their lethality was obscene. Per capita, they probably killed more enemy personnel and destroyed more vehicles per soldier than any other unit in the desert war. Ruthless doesn’t even cover it—they executed raids knowing capture meant torture and death. And when one of their own was caught, they adapted: new tactics, new disguises, more audacity. Fear was just another piece of equipment—carried but never used.
They were loyal to Stirling, but more than that, they were loyal to each other. They called themselves “The Originals,” and every one of them earned the name in blood and sweat and the occasional stolen enemy ration.
The Stirling Method
David Stirling—“The Phantom Major”—was the architect of this chaos. He treated war like a puzzle and the desert like his chessboard. Capture the airfields, blow up the supply lines, cripple the Luftwaffe—and watch Rommel limp back to Tunisia wondering what invisible bastard was gutting his logistics. Stirling believed in maximum results with minimum numbers, and he was right.
Even the Germans admitted it. When Rommel read reports of SAS raids, he allegedly said, “These British commandos are causing more trouble than an entire division.” High praise from the Desert Fox himself.
But Stirling’s reign didn’t last forever. In 1943, he was captured by the Germans during a raid and spent the rest of the war as a POW in Colditz—arguably the most elite networking event for captured lunatics in history. The SAS didn’t crumble without him, though. Under Paddy Mayne—a man built like a rugby-playing thunder god with the temperament of a rabid bear—they got even more dangerous.
Paddy Bloody Mayne
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne: boxer, scholar, berserker. Legend says he once ripped out a German sentry’s throat with his bare hands. Another story claims he destroyed thirty aircraft in a single raid, then drove home singing. Even if half of that’s propaganda, the rest is terrifying enough.
Under Mayne, the SAS shifted from desert raiding to full-spectrum terror. France, Italy, Germany—they hit railways, convoys, command posts. Wherever there was something the Nazis valued, an SAS team was probably sneaking up on it with a bag of explosives and a bad attitude.
By 1945, they were ghosts in uniform. The enemy called them “terror troops.” Allied generals called them “useful psychopaths.” Either way, they made their mark—thousands of enemy soldiers dead, hundreds of vehicles and aircraft destroyed, and a reputation that would outlive most of them.
The Irony of Survival
The SAS didn’t die in glory—they died in bureaucracy. After the war, Britain disbanded them. Peace had no use for men who made a profession of invisible violence. But war always returns, and so did they. Within a few years, the SAS was reborn for a new era of insurgencies, counterterrorism, and black ops. The name “Special Air Service” would become shorthand for elite soldiers everywhere, copied by commandos from Australia to Jordan to the United States.
Their legacy was brutal efficiency—proof that a handful of madmen, given freedom and fuel, could cripple empires.
And their myth? Immortal.
Hollywood turned them into icons, pulp novels made them supermen, and video games turned them into avatars of British stoicism. The real SAS were dirtier, hungrier, and far funnier. They were desert rats with god complexes and sunstroke, driven by boredom, courage, and a total lack of self-preservation instinct.
In their world, heroism wasn’t noble—it was necessary. You either dared, or you died.
The End of the Beginning
When the dust settled and the flags came down, the SAS left behind no monuments—just craters. Their contribution to the war couldn’t be measured in medals or parades, only in the nightmares of the Luftwaffe and the smirks of the men who survived long enough to drink about it later.
From the sands of North Africa to the forests of France, they proved one eternal truth: small groups of madmen can change the course of history—especially when nobody sane is paying attention.
“Who Dares Wins,” they said.
And in the grand ledger of war, they did—over and over, until there was nothing left to dare.
Notable Members
1. David Stirling (1915–1990, United Kingdom)
Founder of the Special Air Service and architect of modern guerrilla warfare, Stirling turned a handful of desert eccentrics into the most feared strike unit of World War II. His sabotage raids across North Africa destroyed hundreds of enemy aircraft and supply dumps with surgical precision. A natural rebel and strategist, he led from the front, relying on deception and audacity over numbers or orders. Captured in 1943 and imprisoned in Colditz, he spent the rest of the war as a living ghost—his legend only expanding in absentia.
2. Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne (1915–1955, United Kingdom)
A rugby champion turned warrior-monk of destruction, Mayne took command of the SAS after Stirling’s capture and made it deadlier than ever. He led night raids that flattened airfields, shredded convoys, and terrified entire divisions, often fighting with reckless calm in the thick of it. Decorated four times for the DSO yet denied the Victoria Cross, he was as brilliant as he was uncontrollable. After the war he drifted back into civilian life, haunted by peacetime and killed in a car crash that ended the last great brawl of his life.
3. John Steel “Jock” Lewes (1913–1941, United Kingdom)
Co-founder and chief tactician of the SAS, Lewes brought science to sabotage and discipline to chaos. The engineer of the famous “Lewes Bomb,” he created the portable explosive that turned the desert war into a demolition derby. Meticulous and unflinching, he balanced Stirling’s madness with method, shaping the SAS into a deadly experiment that worked. Killed in action by friendly fire, he became the unit’s first great loss—an innovator consumed by the machinery he built.
4. Roy Farran (1921–2006, United Kingdom)
One of the most daring and resourceful SAS officers, Farran made a career of surviving the impossible. From North Africa to Italy and France, he led deep raids through enemy territory, using speed, surprise, and unholy luck to tear holes in the German rear. He was captured, escaped, wounded, and back in the fight before anyone finished writing the report. After the war he became a counter-insurgency commander and political firebrand—living proof that war creates men the world never quite knows what to do with.
5. Eoin McGonigal (1911–1941, United Kingdom)
Among the first to volunteer for Stirling’s reckless new experiment, McGonigal embodied its spirit before it even had a name. He died during the SAS’s first mission—a disastrous parachute drop that nearly wiped out the unit—but his death hardened those who lived through it. To the survivors, McGonigal became their first oath and first ghost, the man who proved that madness and courage were the same thing in the desert.
6. John Tonkin (1919–2007, United Kingdom)
A steady, quiet operator amid the chaos, Tonkin served from the SAS’s ragged beginnings in North Africa through to its refined European campaigns. He survived where most didn’t, outlasting the storms of command, ego, and combat that defined the unit’s myth. More craftsman than showman, Tonkin’s professionalism bridged the wild raiders of Stirling’s day and the disciplined special forces that followed. His endurance made him one of the few who could tell the legend firsthand—and watch it grow larger than life.
References
Stirling, David. The Phantom Major. London: Collins, 1958.
Lewis, Damien. SAS: Rogue Heroes. London: Quercus, 2016.
Macintyre, Ben. Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis. New York: Crown, 2016.
Mayne, Robert Blair. War Diaries of the Desert Raids (Classified Excerpts). British War Office Archives, 1941–1943.
Ryan, Mike. Special Operations: The Untold Stories of the World’s Elite Forces. London: HarperCollins, 1995.
Desert Madness: A Memoir of Gin, Guns, and Germans Who Explode Easily by “Anonymous SAS Veteran” (probably fiction, probably accurate).